| V2CNet | We propose V2CNet, a new deep learning framework to automatically translate the demonstration videos to commands that can be directly used in robotic applications. Our V2CNet has two branches and aims at understanding the demonstration video in a fine-grained manner. The first branch has the encoder-decoder architecture to encode the visual features and sequentially generate the output words as a command, while the second branch uses a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to learn the fine-grained actions. By jointly training both branches, the network is able to model the sequential information of the command, while effectively encodes the fine-grained actions. The experimental results on our new large-scale dataset show that V2CNet outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin, while its output can be applied in real robotic applications. The source code and trained models will be made available. |
| Vaccination Heatmaps | WSJ graphics team put together a series of interactive visualisations on the impact of vaccination that blew up on twitter and facebook, and were roundly lauded as great-looking and effective dataviz. Some of these had enough data available to look particularly good. https://…/recreating-a-famous-visualisation https://…/recreating-the-vaccination-heatmaps-in-r |
| Vadalog System (Vadalog) |
Over the past years, there has been a resurgence of Datalog-based systems in the database community as well as in industry. In this context, it has been recognized that to handle the complex knowl\-edge-based scenarios encountered today, such as reasoning over large knowledge graphs, Datalog has to be extended with features such as existential quantification. Yet, Datalog-based reasoning in the presence of existential quantification is in general undecidable. Many efforts have been made to define decidable fragments. Warded Datalog+/- is a very promising one, as it captures PTIME complexity while allowing ontological reasoning. Yet so far, no implementation of Warded Datalog+/- was available. In this paper we present the Vadalog system, a Datalog-based system for performing complex logic reasoning tasks, such as those required in advanced knowledge graphs. The Vadalog system is Oxford’s contribution to the VADA research programme, a joint effort of the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Edinburgh and around 20 industrial partners. As the main contribution of this paper, we illustrate the first implementation of Warded Datalog+/-, a high-performance Datalog+/- system utilizing an aggressive termination control strategy. We also provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation. |
| Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) |
VADER Sentiment Analysis. VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a lexicon and rule-based sentiment analysis tool that is specifically attuned to sentiments expressed in social media, and works well on texts from other domains. |
| Validation Set | A set of examples used to tune the parameters of a classifier. http://…/StatLearn12.pdf |
| Value Aggregation | Value aggregation is a general framework for solving imitation learning problems. Based on the idea of data aggregation, it generates a policy sequence by iteratively interleaving policy optimization and evaluation in an online learning setting. |
| Value at Risk (VaR) |
In financial mathematics and financial risk management, value at risk (VaR) is a widely used risk measure of the risk of loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets. For a given portfolio, time horizon, and probability p, the 100p% VaR is defined as a threshold loss value, such that the probability that the loss on the portfolio over the given time horizon exceeds this value is p. This assumes mark-to-market pricing, normal markets, and no trading in the portfolio. |
| Value Charts Indicator (VCI) |
The indicator displays the trend-adjusted price activity of a security. It oscillates around the zero-line and is displayed as a candlestick chart. |
| Value Iteration Network (VIN) |
We introduce the value iteration network: a fully differentiable neural network with a `planning module’ embedded within. Value iteration networks are suitable for making predictions about outcomes that involve planning-based reasoning, such as predicting a desired trajectory from an observation of a map. Key to our approach is a novel differentiable approximation of the value-iteration algorithm, which can be represented as a convolutional neural network, and trained end-to-end using standard backpropagation. We evaluate our value iteration networks on the task of predicting optimal obstacle-avoiding trajectories from an image of a landscape, both on synthetic data, and on challenging raw images of the Mars terrain. Value Iteration Networks |
| Value of Unlabeled Data | We quantify the separation between the numbers of labeled examples required to learn in two settings: Settings with and without the knowledge of the distribution of the unlabeled data. More specifically, we prove a separation by $\Theta(\log n)$ multiplicative factor for the class of projections over the Boolean hypercube of dimension $n$. We prove that there is no separation for the class of all functions on domain of any size. Learning with the knowledge of the distribution (a.k.a. fixed-distribution learning) can be viewed as an idealized scenario of semi-supervised learning where the number of unlabeled data points is so great that the unlabeled distribution is known exactly. For this reason, we call the separation the value of unlabeled data. |
| Value Prediction Network (VPN) |
This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture, called Value Prediction Network (VPN), which integrates model-free and model-based RL methods into a single neural network. In contrast to typical model-based RL methods, VPN learns a dynamics model whose abstract states are trained to make option-conditional predictions of future values (discounted sum of rewards) rather than of future observations. Our experimental results show that VPN has several advantages over both model-free and model-based baselines in a stochastic environment where careful planning is required but building an accurate observation-prediction model is difficult. Furthermore, VPN outperforms Deep Q-Network (DQN) on several Atari games even with short-lookahead planning, demonstrating its potential as a new way of learning a good state representation. |
| Value Propagation Network (VProp) |
We present Value Propagation (VProp), a parameter-efficient differentiable planning module built on Value Iteration which can successfully be trained using reinforcement learning to solve unseen tasks, has the capability to generalize to larger map sizes, and can learn to navigate in dynamic environments. Furthermore, we show that the module enables learning to plan when the environment also includes stochastic elements, providing a cost-efficient learning system to build low-level size-invariant planners for a variety of interactive navigation problems. We evaluate on static and dynamic configurations of MazeBase grid-worlds, with randomly generated environments of several different sizes, and on a StarCraft navigation scenario, with more complex dynamics, and pixels as input. |
| Value-Added Modeling | Value-added modeling (also known as value-added analysis and value-added assessment) is a method of teacher evaluation that measures the teacher’s contribution in a given year by comparing the current test scores of their students to the scores of those same students in previous school years, as well as to the scores of other students in the same grade. In this manner, value-added modeling seeks to isolate the contribution, or value added, that each teacher provides in a given year, which can be compared to the performance measures of other teachers. VAMs are considered to be fairer than simply comparing student’s achievement scores or gain scores without considering potentially confounding context variables like past performance or income. It is also possible to use this approach to estimate the value added by the school principal or the school as a whole. Critics say that the use of tests to evaluate individual teachers has not been scientifically validated, and much of the results are due to chance or conditions beyond the teacher’s control, such as outside tutoring. Research shows, however, that differences in teacher effectiveness as measured by value-added of teachers are associated with very large economic effects on students. RealVAMS |
| Value-by-Alpha Map | Value-by-Alpha is essentially a bivariate choropleth technique that “equalizes” a base map so that the visual weight of a map unit corresponds to some data value. Whereas cartograms accomplish this by varying size, VbA modifies the alpha channel (transparency, basically) of map units overlain on a neutral color background. Thus shapes and sizes are not distorted (except necessarily by the map projection, of course), but the lower-impact units with lower alpha values fade into the background and make for a map that is visually equalized by the data. |
| Value-Gradient Backpropagation (GProp) |
This paper proposes GProp, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous policies with compatible function approximation. The algorithm is based on two innovations. Firstly, we present a temporal-difference based method for learning the gradient of the value-function. Secondly, we present the deviator-actor-critic (DAC) model, which comprises three neural networks that estimate the value function, its gradient, and determine the actor’s policy respectively. We evaluate GProp on two challenging tasks: a contextual bandit problem constructed from nonparametric regression datasets that is designed to probe the ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to accurately estimate gradients; and the octopus arm, a challenging reinforcement learning benchmark. GProp is competitive with fully supervised methods on the bandit task and achieves the best performance to date on the octopus arm. |
| Vanishing Gradient Problem | In machine learning, the vanishing gradient problem is a difficulty found in training artificial neural networks with gradient-based learning methods and backpropagation. In such methods, each of the neural network’s weights receives an update proportional to the partial derivative of the error function with respect to the current weight in each iteration of training. The problem is that in some cases, the gradient will be vanishingly small, effectively preventing the weight from changing its value. In the worst case, this may completely stop the neural network from further training. As one example of the problem cause, traditional activation functions such as the hyperbolic tangent function have gradients in the range (0, 1), and backpropagation computes gradients by the chain rule. This has the effect of multiplying n of these small numbers to compute gradients of the ‘front’ layers in an n-layer network, meaning that the gradient (error signal) decreases exponentially with n while the front layers train very slowly. Back-propagation allowed researchers to train supervised deep artificial neural networks from scratch, initially with little success. Hochreiter’s diploma thesis of 1991[1][2] formally identified the reason for this failure in the ‘vanishing gradient problem’, which not only affects many-layered feedforward networks,[3] but also recurrent networks.[4] The latter are trained by unfolding them into very deep feedforward networks, where a new layer is created for each time step of an input sequence processed by the network. When activation functions are used whose derivatives can take on larger values, one risks encountering the related exploding gradient problem. |
| Vanlearning | Although we have tons of machine learning tools to analyze data, most of them require users have some programming backgrounds. Here we introduce a SaaS application which allows users analyze their data without any coding and even without any knowledge of machine learning. Users can upload, train, predict and download their data by simply clicks their mouses. Our system uses data pre-processor and validator to relieve the computational cost of our server. The simple architecture of Vanlearning helps developers can easily maintain and extend it. |
| Vapnik Chervonenkis Dimension (VC) |
In statistical learning theory, or sometimes computational learning theory, the VC dimension (for Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension) is a measure of the capacity of a statistical classification algorithm, defined as the cardinality of the largest set of points that the algorithm can shatter. It is a core concept in Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory, and was originally defined by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis. Informally, the capacity of a classification model is related to how complicated it can be. For example, consider the thresholding of a high-degree polynomial: if the polynomial evaluates above zero, that point is classified as positive, otherwise as negative. A high-degree polynomial can be wiggly, so it can fit a given set of training points well. But one can expect that the classifier will make errors on other points, because it is too wiggly. Such a polynomial has a high capacity. A much simpler alternative is to threshold a linear function. This function may not fit the training set well, because it has a low capacity |
| Vapnik Chervonenkis Theory (VC Theory) |
Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory (also known as VC theory) was developed during 1960-1990 by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis. The theory is a form of computational learning theory, which attempts to explain the learning process from a statistical point of view. VC theory covers at least four parts: · Theory of consistency of learning processes · Nonasymptotic theory of the rate of convergence of learning processes · Theory of controlling the generalization ability of learning processes · Theory of constructing learning machines |
| varbvs | We introduce varbvs, a suite of functions written in R and MATLAB for regression analysis of large-scale data sets using Bayesian variable selection methods. We have developed numerical optimization algorithms based on variational approximation methods that make it feasible to apply Bayesian variable selection to very large data sets. With a focus on examples from genome-wide association studies, we demonstrate that varbvs scales well to data sets with hundreds of thousands of variables and thousands of samples, and has features that facilitate rapid data analyses. Moreover, varbvs allows for extensive model customization, which can be used to incorporate external information into the analysis. We expect that the combination of an easy-to-use interface and robust, scalable algorithms for posterior computation will encourage broader use of Bayesian variable selection in areas of applied statistics and computational biology. The most recent R and MATLAB source code is available for download at Github (https://…/varbvs ), and the R package can be installed from CRAN (https://…/package=varbvs ). |
| Varchenko Determinant | Varchenko introduced a distance function on chambers of a hyperplane arrangement which gives rise to a determinant indexed by chambers whose entry in position $(C,D)$ is the distance between $C$ and $D$, and proved that that determinant has a nice factorization: that is the Varchenko determinant. Recently, Aguiar and Mahajan defined a generalization of that distance function, and proved that, for a central hyperplane arrangement, the determinant given rise by their distance function has also a nice factorization. We prove that, for any hyperplane arrangement, the determinant given rise by the distance function of Aguiar and Mahajan has a nice factorization. We also prove that the same is true for the determinant indexed by chambers of an apartment. |
| Variable Importance Plot | randomForest |
| Variable Selection Deviation (VSD) |
Variable selection deviation measures and instability tests for high-dimensional model selection methods such as LASSO, SCAD and MCP, etc., to decide whether the sparse patterns identified by those methods are reliable. glmvsd |
| Variable Size based Fixed Passes Combined-counting (VFPC) |
Many techniques have been proposed to implement the Apriori algorithm on MapReduce framework but only a few have focused on performance improvement. FPC (Fixed Passes Combined-counting) and DPC (Dynamic Passes Combined-counting) algorithms combine multiple passes of Apriori in a single MapReduce phase to reduce the execution time. In this paper, we propose improved MapReduce based Apriori algorithms VFPC (Variable Size based Fixed Passes Combined-counting) and ETDPC (Elapsed Time based Dynamic Passes Combined-counting) over FPC and DPC. Further, we optimize the multi-pass phases of these algorithms by skipping pruning step in some passes, and propose Optimized-VFPC and Optimized-ETDPC algorithms. Quantitative analysis reveals that counting cost of additional un-pruned candidates produced due to skipped-pruning is less significant than reduction in computation cost due to the same. Experimental results show that VFPC and ETDPC are more robust and flexible than FPC and DPC whereas their optimized versions are more efficient in terms of execution time. |
| Variance Component Analysis (VCA) |
Variance components models are a way to assess the amount of variation in a dependent variable that is associated with one or more random-effects variables. The central output is a variance components table which shows the proportion of variance attributable to a random effects variable’s main effect and, optionally, the random variable’s interactions with other factors. Random effects variables are categorical variables (factors) whose categories (levels) are conceived as a random sample of all categories. Examples might include grouping variables like schools in a study of students, days of the month in a marketing study, or subject id in repeated measures studies. Variance components analysis will show whether such random school-level effects, day-of-month effects, or subject effects are important or if they may be discounted. Variance components analysis usually applies to a mixed effects model – that is, one in which there are random and fixed effects, differences in either of which might account for variance in the dependent variable. There must be at least one random effects variable. To illustrate, a researcher might study time-to-promotion for a random sample of firemen in randomly selected fire stations, also looking at hours of training of the firemen. Stations would be a random effect. Training would be a fixed effect. Variance components analysis would reveal if the between-stations random effect accounted for an important or a trivial amount of the variance in time-to-promotion, based on a model which included random-effects variables, fixed-effects variables, covariates, and interactions among them. It should be noted that variance components analysis has largely been superceded by linear mixed models and generalized linear mixed models analysis. The variance components procedure is often an adjunct to these procedures. Unlike them, the variance components procedure estimates only variance components, not model regression coefficients. Variance components analysis may be seen as a more computationally efficient procedure useful for models in special designs, such as split plot, univariate repeated measures, random block, and other mixed effects designs. VCA |
| Variance Component Model | |
| Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) |
A result from a standard linear model course is that the variance of the ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficient of a variable will never decrease if we add additional covariates. The variance inflation factor (VIF) measures the increase of the variance. Another result from a standard linear model or experimental design course is that including additional covariates in a linear model of the outcome on the treatment indicator will never increase the variance of the OLS coefficient of the treatment at least asymptotically. This technique is called the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), which is often used to improve the efficiency of treatment effect estimation. So we have two paradoxical results: adding covariates never decreases the variance in the first result but never increases the variance in the second result. In fact, these two results are derived under different assumptions. More precisely, the VIF result conditions on the treatment indicators but the ANCOVA result requires random treatment indicators. In a completely randomized experiment, the estimator without adjusting for additional covariates has smaller conditional variance at the cost of a larger conditional bias, compared to the estimator adjusting for additional covariates. Thus, there is no real paradox. |
| Variance Inflation Factor Change Point Detection (VIFCP) |
VIFCP |
| Variance Network | In this paper, we propose variance networks, a new model that stores the learned information in the variances of the network weights. Surprisingly, no information gets stored in the expectations of the weights, therefore if we replace these weights with their expectations, we would obtain a random guess quality prediction. We provide a numerical criterion that uses the loss curvature to determine which random variables can be replaced with their expected values, and find that only a small fraction of weights is needed for ensembling. Variance networks represent a diverse ensemble that is more robust to adversarial attacks than conventional low-variance ensembles. The success of this model raises several counter-intuitive implications for the training and application of Deep Learning models. |
| Variance Reduction (VR) |
In mathematics, more specifically in the theory of Monte Carlo methods, variance reduction is a procedure used to increase the precision of the estimates that can be obtained for a given number of iterations. Every output random variable from the simulation is associated with a variance which limits the precision of the simulation results. In order to make a simulation statistically efficient, i.e., to obtain a greater precision and smaller confidence intervals for the output random variable of interest, variance reduction techniques can be used. The main ones are: Common random numbers, antithetic variates, control variates, importance sampling and stratified sampling. Under these headings are a variety of specialized techniques; for example, particle transport simulations make extensive use of ‘weight windows’ and ‘splitting/Russian roulette’ techniques, which are a form of importance sampling. |
| Variance Suppression Gradient Descent (VSSGD) |
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes the error variance and error mean both into consideration. The adaptively adjusting approach of two terms trading off is also given in our algorithm. Due to this algorithm can suppress error variance, we named it Variance Suppression Gradient Descent (VSSGD). Experimental results have demonstrated that VSSGD can accelerate the training process, effectively prevent overfitting, improve the networks learning capacity from small samples. |
| Variation Network (VarNet) |
This paper presents the Variation Network (VarNet), a generative model providing means to manipulate the high-level attributes of a given input. The originality of our approach is that VarNet is not only capable of handling pre-defined attributes but can also learn the relevant attributes of the dataset by itself. These two settings can be easily combined which makes VarNet applicable for a wide variety of tasks. Further, VarNet has a sound probabilistic interpretation which grants us with a novel way to navigate in the latent spaces as well as means to control how the attributes are learned. We demonstrate experimentally that this model is capable of performing interesting input manipulation and that the learned attributes are relevant and interpretable. |
| Variation of Information Distance (VI) |
In probability theory and information theory, the variation of information or shared information distance is a measure of the distance between two clusterings (partitions of elements). It is closely related to mutual information; indeed, it is a simple linear expression involving the mutual information. Unlike the mutual information, however, the variation of information is a true metric, in that it obeys the triangle inequality. Even more, it is a universal metric, in that if any other distance measure two items close-by, then the variation of information will also judge them close. |
| Variational Adaptive Newton (VAN) |
We present the Variational Adaptive Newton (VAN) method which is a black-box optimization method especially suitable for explorative-learning tasks such as active learning and reinforcement learning. Similar to Bayesian methods, VAN estimates a distribution that can be used for exploration, but requires computations that are similar to continuous optimization methods. Our theoretical contribution reveals that VAN is a second-order method that unifies existing methods in distinct fields of continuous optimization, variational inference, and evolution strategies. Our experimental results show that VAN performs well on a wide-variety of learning tasks. This work presents a general-purpose explorative-learning method that has the potential to improve learning in areas such as active learning and reinforcement learning. |
| Variational Autoencoder (VAE) |
How can we perform efficient approximate inference and learning with directed probabilistic models whose continuous latent variables and/or parameters have intractable posterior distributions? The variational Bayesian (VB) approach involves the optimization of an approximation to the intractable posterior. Unfortunately, the common mean-field approach requires analytical solutions of expectations w.r.t. the approximate posterior, which are also intractable in the general case. We show how a reparameterization of the variational lower bound yields a simple differentiable unbiased estimator of the lower bound; this SGVB (Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes) estimator can be used for efficient approximate posterior inference in almost any model with continuous latent variables and/or parameters, and is straightforward to optimize using standard stochastic gradient ascent techniques. For the case of an i.i.d. dataset and continuous latent variables per datapoint, we propose the Auto- Encoding VB (AEVB) algorithm. In the AEVB algorithm we make inference and learning especially efficient by using the SGVB estimator to optimize a recognition model that allows us to perform very efficient approximate posterior inference using simple ancestral sampling, which in turn allows us to efficiently learn the model parameters, without the need of expensive iterative inference schemes (such as MCMC) per datapoint. The learned approximate posterior inference model can also be used for a host of tasks such as recognition, denoising, representation and visualization purposes. When a neural network is used for the recognition model, we arrive at the variational auto-encoder. |
| Variational Autoencoding Learning of Options by Reinforcement (VALOR) |
We explore methods for option discovery based on variational inference and make two algorithmic contributions. First: we highlight a tight connection between variational option discovery methods and variational autoencoders, and introduce Variational Autoencoding Learning of Options by Reinforcement (VALOR), a new method derived from the connection. In VALOR, the policy encodes contexts from a noise distribution into trajectories, and the decoder recovers the contexts from the complete trajectories. Second: we propose a curriculum learning approach where the number of contexts seen by the agent increases whenever the agent’s performance is strong enough (as measured by the decoder) on the current set of contexts. We show that this simple trick stabilizes training for VALOR and prior variational option discovery methods, allowing a single agent to learn many more modes of behavior than it could with a fixed context distribution. Finally, we investigate other topics related to variational option discovery, including fundamental limitations of the general approach and the applicability of learned options to downstream tasks. |
| Variational Bayesian Dropout (VBD) |
Variational dropout (VD) is a generalization of Gaussian dropout, which aims at inferring the posterior of network weights based on a log-uniform prior on them to learn these weights as well as dropout rate simultaneously. The log-uniform prior not only interprets the regularization capacity of Gaussian dropout in network training, but also underpins the inference of such posterior. However, the log-uniform prior is an improper prior (i.e., its integral is infinite) which causes the inference of posterior to be ill-posed, thus restricting the regularization performance of VD. To address this problem, we present a new generalization of Gaussian dropout, termed variational Bayesian dropout (VBD), which turns to exploit a hierarchical prior on the network weights and infer a new joint posterior. Specifically, we implement the hierarchical prior as a zero-mean Gaussian distribution with variance sampled from a uniform hyper-prior. Then, we incorporate such a prior into inferring the joint posterior over network weights and the variance in the hierarchical prior, with which both the network training and the dropout rate estimation can be cast into a joint optimization problem. More importantly, the hierarchical prior is a proper prior which enables the inference of posterior to be well-posed. In addition, we further show that the proposed VBD can be seamlessly applied to network compression. Experiments on both classification and network compression tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed VBD in terms of regularizing network training. |
| Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC) |
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to the gradient or a large number of likelihood evaluations. We introduce here a novel sample-efficient inference framework, Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC). VBMC combines variational inference with Gaussian-process based, active-sampling Bayesian quadrature, using the latter to efficiently approximate the intractable integral in the variational objective. Our method produces both a nonparametric approximation of the posterior distribution and an approximate lower bound of the model evidence, useful for model selection. We demonstrate VBMC both on several synthetic likelihoods and on a neuronal model with data from real neurons. Across all tested problems and dimensions (up to $D = 10$), VBMC performs consistently well in reconstructing the posterior and the model evidence with a limited budget of likelihood evaluations, unlike other methods that work only in very low dimensions. Our framework shows great promise as a novel tool for posterior and model inference with expensive, black-box likelihoods. |
| Variational Bayesian Sparse Gaussian Process Regression (VBSGPR) |
This paper presents a novel variational inference framework for deriving a family of Bayesian sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models whose approximations are variationally optimal with respect to the full-rank GPR model enriched with various corresponding correlation structures of the observation noises. Our variational Bayesian SGPR (VBSGPR) models jointly treat both the distributions of the inducing variables and hyperparameters as variational parameters, which enables the decomposability of the variational lower bound that in turn can be exploited for stochastic optimization. Such a stochastic optimization involves iteratively following the stochastic gradient of the variational lower bound to improve its estimates of the optimal variational distributions of the inducing variables and hyperparameters (and hence the predictive distribution) of our VBSGPR models and is guaranteed to achieve asymptotic convergence to them. We show that the stochastic gradient is an unbiased estimator of the exact gradient and can be computed in constant time per iteration, hence achieving scalability to big data. We empirically evaluate the performance of our proposed framework on two real-world, massive datasets. |
| Variational Bi-LSTM | Recurrent neural networks like long short-term memory (LSTM) are important architectures for sequential prediction tasks. LSTMs (and RNNs in general) model sequences along the forward time direction. Bidirectional LSTMs (Bi-LSTMs) on the other hand model sequences along both forward and backward directions and are generally known to perform better at such tasks because they capture a richer representation of the data. In the training of Bi-LSTMs, the forward and backward paths are learned independently. We propose a variant of the Bi-LSTM architecture, which we call Variational Bi-LSTM, that creates a channel between the two paths (during training, but which may be omitted during inference); thus optimizing the two paths jointly. We arrive at this joint objective for our model by minimizing a variational lower bound of the joint likelihood of the data sequence. Our model acts as a regularizer and encourages the two networks to inform each other in making their respective predictions using distinct information. We perform ablation studies to better understand the different components of our model and evaluate the method on various benchmarks, showing state-of-the-art performance. |
| Variational Collaborative Model (VCM) |
Collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully employed by many modern recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the user-item interaction data as the sole information source to recommend items to users. However, CF-based methods are known for suffering from cold start problems and data sparsity problems. Hybrid models that utilize auxiliary information on top of interaction data have increasingly gained attention. A few ‘collaborative learning’-based models, which tightly bridges two heterogeneous learners through mutual regularization, are recently proposed for the hybrid recommendation. However, the ‘collaboration’ in the existing methods are actually asynchronous due to the alternative optimization of the two learners. Leveraging the recent advances in variational autoencoder~(VAE), we here propose a model consisting of two streams of mutual linked VAEs, named variational collaborative model (VCM). Unlike the mutual regularization used in previous works where two learners are optimized asynchronously, VCM enables a synchronous collaborative learning mechanism. Besides, the two stream VAEs setup allows VCM to fully leverages the Bayesian probabilistic representations in collaborative learning. Extensive experiments on three real-life datasets have shown that VCM outperforms several state-of-art methods. |
| Variational Continual Learning | This paper develops variational continual learning (VCL), a simple but general framework for continual learning that fuses online variational inference (VI) and recent advances in Monte Carlo VI for neural networks. The framework can successfully train both deep discriminative models and deep generative models in complex continual learning settings where existing tasks evolve over time and entirely new tasks emerge. Experimental results show that variational continual learning outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on a variety of tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting in a fully automatic way. |
| Variational Contrastive Divergence (VCD) |
We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To make inference tractable, we introduce the variational contrastive divergence (VCD), a new divergence that replaces the standard Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence used in VI. The VCD captures a notion of discrepancy between the initial variational distribution and its improved version (obtained after running the MCMC steps), and it converges asymptotically to the symmetrized KL divergence between the variational distribution and the posterior of interest. The VCD objective can be optimized efficiently with respect to the variational parameters via stochastic optimization. We show experimentally that optimizing the VCD leads to better predictive performance on two latent variable models: logistic matrix factorization and variational autoencoders (VAEs). |
| Variational Deep Embedding (VaDE) |
Clustering is among the most fundamental tasks in computer vision and machine learning. In this paper, we propose Variational Deep Embedding (VaDE), a novel unsupervised generative clustering approach within the framework of Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). Specifically, VaDE models the data generative procedure with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and a deep neural network (DNN): 1) the GMM picks a cluster; 2) from which a latent embedding is generated; 3) then the DNN decodes the latent embedding into observables. Inference in VaDE is done in a variational way: a different DNN is used to encode observables to latent embeddings, so that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) can be optimized using Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes (SGVB) estimator and the reparameterization trick. Quantitative comparisons with strong baselines are included in this paper, and experimental results show that VaDE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art clustering methods on 4 benchmarks from various modalities. Moreover, by VaDE’s generative nature, we show its capability of generating highly realistic samples for any specified cluster, without using supervised information during training. Lastly, VaDE is a flexible and extensible framework for unsupervised generative clustering, more general mixture models than GMM can be easily plugged in. |
| Variational Deep Q Network | We propose a framework that directly tackles the probability distribution of the value function parameters in Deep Q Network (DQN), with powerful variational inference subroutines to approximate the posterior of the parameters. We will establish the equivalence between our proposed surrogate objective and variational inference loss. Our new algorithm achieves efficient exploration and performs well on large scale chain Markov Decision Process (MDP). |
| Variational Gaussian Process (VGP) |
Representations offered by deep generative models are fundamentally tied to their inference method from data. Variational inference methods require a rich family of approximating distributions. We construct the variational Gaussian process (VGP), a Bayesian nonparametric model which adapts its shape to match complex posterior distributions. The VGP generates approximate posterior samples by generating latent inputs and warping them through random non-linear mappings; the distribution over random mappings is learned during inference, enabling the transformed outputs to adapt to varying complexity. We prove a universal approximation theorem for the VGP, demonstrating its representative power for learning any model. For inference we present a variational objective inspired by autoencoders and perform black box inference over a wide class of models. The VGP achieves new state-of-the-art results for unsupervised learning, inferring models such as the deep latent Gaussian model and the recently proposed DRAW. |
| Variational Generative Adversarial net (VGAN) |
In this paper, we propose a model using generative adversarial net (GAN) to generate realistic text. Instead of using standard GAN, we combine variational autoencoder (VAE) with generative adversarial net. The use of high-level latent random variables is helpful to learn the data distribution and solve the problem that generative adversarial net always emits the similar data. We propose the VGAN model where the generative model is composed of recurrent neural network and VAE. The discriminative model is a convolutional neural network. We train the model via policy gradient. We apply the proposed model to the task of text generation and compare it to other recent neural network based models, such as recurrent neural network language model and SeqGAN. We evaluate the performance of the model by calculating negative log-likelihood and the BLEU score. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets, and results show that our model outperforms other previous models. |
| Variational Inference | One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation involving the posterior density. In this paper, we review variational inference (VI), a method from machine learning that approximates probability densities through optimization. VI has been used in many applications and tends to be faster than classical methods, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. The idea behind VI is to first posit a family of densities and then to find the member of that family which is close to the target. Closeness is measured by Kullback-Leibler divergence. We review the ideas behind mean-field variational inference, discuss the special case of VI applied to exponential family models, present a full example with a Bayesian mixture of Gaussians, and derive a variant that uses stochastic optimization to scale up to massive data. We discuss modern research in VI and highlight important open problems. VI is powerful, but it is not yet well understood. Our hope in writing this paper is to catalyze statistical research on this class of algorithms. Fast yet Simple Natural-Gradient Descent for Variational Inference in Complex Models |
| Variational Inference for Nonlinear Dynamics (VIND) |
Latent variable models have been widely applied for the analysis and visualization of large datasets. In the case of sequential data, closed-form inference is possible when the transition and observation functions are linear. However, approximate inference techniques are usually necessary when dealing with nonlinear dynamics and observation functions. Here, we propose a novel variational inference framework for the explicit modeling of time series, Variational Inference for Nonlinear Dynamics (VIND), that is able to uncover nonlinear observation and transition functions from sequential data. The framework includes a structured approximate posterior, and an algorithm that relies on the fixed-point iteration method to find the best estimate for latent trajectories. We apply the method to several datasets and show that it is able to accurately infer the underlying dynamics of these systems, in some cases substantially outperforming state-of-the-art methods. |
| Variational Information Bottleneck Approach (VIBI) |
Briefness and comprehensiveness are necessary in order to give a lot of information concisely in explaining a black-box decision system. However, existing interpretable machine learning methods fail to consider briefness and comprehensiveness simultaneously, which may lead to redundant explanations. We propose a system-agnostic interpretable method that provides a brief but comprehensive explanation by adopting the inspiring information theoretic principle, information bottleneck principle. Using an information theoretic objective, VIBI selects instance-wise key features that are maximally compressed about an input (briefness), and informative about a decision made by a black-box on that input (comprehensive). The selected key features act as an information bottleneck that serves as a concise explanation for each black-box decision. We show that VIBI outperforms other interpretable machine learning methods in terms of both interpretability and fidelity evaluated by human and quantitative metrics. |
| Variational Inverse Control With Events (VICE) |
The design of a reward function often poses a major practical challenge to real-world applications of reinforcement learning. Approaches such as inverse reinforcement learning attempt to overcome this challenge, but require expert demonstrations, which can be difficult or expensive to obtain in practice. We propose variational inverse control with events (VICE), which generalizes inverse reinforcement learning methods to cases where full demonstrations are not needed, such as when only samples of desired goal states are available. Our method is grounded in an alternative perspective on control and reinforcement learning, where an agent’s goal is to maximize the probability that one or more events will happen at some point in the future, rather than maximizing cumulative rewards. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on continuous control tasks, with a focus on high-dimensional observations like images where rewards are hard or even impossible to specify. |
| Variational Memory Encoder-Decoder (VMED) |
Introducing variability while maintaining coherence is a core task in learning to generate utterances in conversation. Standard neural encoder-decoder models and their extensions using conditional variational autoencoder often result in either trivial or digressive responses. To overcome this, we explore a novel approach that injects variability into neural encoder-decoder via the use of external memory as a mixture model, namely Variational Memory Encoder-Decoder (VMED). By associating each memory read with a mode in the latent mixture distribution at each timestep, our model can capture the variability observed in sequential data such as natural conversations. We empirically compare the proposed model against other recent approaches on various conversational datasets. The results show that VMED consistently achieves significant improvement over others in both metric-based and qualitative evaluations. |
| Variational Message Passing (VMP) |
Variational message passing (VMP) is an approximate inference technique for continuous- or discrete-valued Bayesian networks, with conjugate-exponential parents, developed by John Winn. VMP was developed as a means of generalizing the approximate variational methods used by such techniques as Latent Dirichlet allocation and works by updating an approximate distribution at each node through messages in the node’s Markov blanket. |
| Variational Mode Decomposition (VMP) |
During the late 1990s, Huang introduced the algorithm called Empirical Mode Decomposition, which is widely used today to recursively decompose a signal into different modes of unknown but separate spectral bands. EMD is known for limitations like sensitivity to noise and sampling. These limitations could only partially be addressed by more mathematical attempts to this decomposition problem, like synchrosqueezing, empirical wavelets or recursive variational decomposition. Here, we propose an entirely non-recursive variational mode decomposition model, where the modes are extracted concurrently. The model looks for an ensemble of modes and their respective center frequencies, such that the modes collectively reproduce the input signal, while each being smooth after demodulation into baseband. In Fourier domain, this corresponds to a narrow-band prior. We show important relations to Wiener filter denoising. Indeed, the proposed method is a generalization of the classic Wiener filter into multiple, adaptive bands. Our model provides a solution to the decomposition problem that is theoretically well founded and still easy to understand. The variational model is efficiently optimized using an alternating direction method of multipliers approach. Preliminary results show attractive performance with respect to existing mode decomposition models. In particular, our proposed model is much more robust to sampling and noise. Finally, we show promising practical decomposition results on a series of artificial and real data. vmd |
| Variational Neural Network | The choice of activation function can significantly influence the performance of neural networks. The lack of guiding principles for the selection of activation function is lamentable. We try to address this issue by introducing our variational neural networks, where the activation function is represented as a linear combination of possible candidate functions, and an optimal activation is obtained via minimization of a loss function using gradient descent method. The gradient formulae for the loss function with respect to these expansion coefficients are central for the implementation of gradient descent algorithm, and here we derive these gradient formulae. |
| Variational Noise-Contrastive Estimation | Unnormalised latent variable models are a broad and flexible class of statistical models. However, learning their parameters from data is intractable, and few estimation techniques are currently available for such models. To increase the number of techniques in our arsenal, we propose variational noise-contrastive estimation (VNCE), building on NCE which is a method that only applies to unnormalised models. The core idea is to use a variational lower bound to the NCE objective function, which can be optimised in the same fashion as the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in standard variational inference (VI). We prove that VNCE can be used for both parameter estimation of unnormalised models and posterior inference of latent variables. The developed theory shows that VNCE has the same level of generality as standard VI, meaning that advances made there can be directly imported to the unnormalised setting. We validate VNCE on toy models and apply it to a realistic problem of estimating an undirected graphical model from incomplete data. |
| Variational Policy Embedding (VPE) |
Reinforcement Learning methods are capable of solving complex problems, but resulting policies might perform poorly in environments that are even slightly different. In robotics especially, training and deployment conditions often vary and data collection is expensive, making retraining undesirable. Simulation training allows for feasible training times, but on the other hand suffers from a reality-gap when applied in real-world settings. This raises the need of efficient adaptation of policies acting in new environments. We consider this as a problem of transferring knowledge within a family of similar Markov decision processes. For this purpose we assume that Q-functions are generated by some low-dimensional latent variable. Given such a Q-function, we can find a master policy that can adapt given different values of this latent variable. Our method learns both the generative mapping and an approximate posterior of the latent variables, enabling identification of policies for new tasks by searching only in the latent space, rather than the space of all policies. The low-dimensional space, and master policy found by our method enables policies to quickly adapt to new environments. We demonstrate the method on both a pendulum swing-up task in simulation, and for simulation-to-real transfer on a pushing task. |
| Variational Predictive Natural Gradient | Variational inference transforms posterior inference into parametric optimization thereby enabling the use of latent variable models where otherwise impractical. However, variational inference can be finicky when different variational parameters control variables that are strongly correlated under the model. Traditional natural gradients based on the variational approximation fail to correct for correlations when the approximation is not the true posterior. To address this, we construct a new natural gradient called the variational predictive natural gradient. It is constructed as an average of the Fisher information of the reparameterized predictive model distribution. Unlike traditional natural gradients for variational inference, this natural gradient accounts for the relationship between model parameters and variational parameters. We also show the variational predictive natural gradient relates to the negative Hessian of the expected log-likelihood. A simple example shows the insight. We demonstrate the empirical value of our method on a classification task, a deep generative model of images, and probabilistic matrix factorization for recommendation. |
| Variational Recurrent Neural Machine Translation (VRNMT) |
Partially inspired by successful applications of variational recurrent neural networks, we propose a novel variational recurrent neural machine translation (VRNMT) model in this paper. Different from the variational NMT, VRNMT introduces a series of latent random variables to model the translation procedure of a sentence in a generative way, instead of a single latent variable. Specifically, the latent random variables are included into the hidden states of the NMT decoder with elements from the variational autoencoder. In this way, these variables are recurrently generated, which enables them to further capture strong and complex dependencies among the output translations at different timesteps. In order to deal with the challenges in performing efficient posterior inference and large-scale training during the incorporation of latent variables, we build a neural posterior approximator, and equip it with a reparameterization technique to estimate the variational lower bound. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvements over both the conventional and variational NMT models. |
| Variational Simulation-Based Calibration (VSBC) |
While it’s always possible to compute a variational approximation to a posterior distribution, it can be difficult to discover problems with this approximation’. We propose two diagnostic algorithms to alleviate this problem. The Pareto-smoothed importance sampling (PSIS) diagnostic gives a goodness of fit measurement for joint distributions, while simultaneously improving the error in the estimate. The variational simulation-based calibration (VSBC) assesses the average performance of point estimates. |
| Variational Time Series Feature Extractor (VTSFE) |
We propose a Variational Time Series Feature Extractor (VTSFE), inspired by the VAE-DMP model of Chen et al., to be used for action recognition and prediction. Our method is based on variational autoencoders. It improves VAE-DMP in that it has a better noise inference model, a simpler transition model constraining the acceleration in the trajectories of the latent space, and a tighter lower bound for the variational inference. We apply the method for classification and prediction of whole-body movements on a dataset with 7 tasks and 10 demonstrations per task, recorded with a wearable motion capture suit. The comparison with VAE and VAE-DMP suggests the better performance of our method for feature extraction. An open-source software implementation of each method with TensorFlow is also provided. In addition, a more detailed version of this work can be found in the indicated code repository. Although it was meant to, the VTSFE hasn’t been tested for action prediction, due to a lack of time in the context of Maxime Chaveroche’s Master thesis at INRIA. |
| Variational Walkback | We propose a novel method to directly learn a stochastic transition operator whose repeated application provides generated samples. Traditional undirected graphical models approach this problem indirectly by learning a Markov chain model whose stationary distribution obeys detailed balance with respect to a parameterized energy function. The energy function is then modified so the model and data distributions match, with no guarantee on the number of steps required for the Markov chain to converge. Moreover, the detailed balance condition is highly restrictive: energy based models corresponding to neural networks must have symmetric weights, unlike biological neural circuits. In contrast, we develop a method for directly learning arbitrarily parameterized transition operators capable of expressing non-equilibrium stationary distributions that violate detailed balance, thereby enabling us to learn more biologically plausible asymmetric neural networks and more general non-energy based dynamical systems. The proposed training objective, which we derive via principled variational methods, encourages the transition operator to ‘walk back’ in multi-step trajectories that start at data-points, as quickly as possible back to the original data points. We present a series of experimental results illustrating the soundness of the proposed approach, Variational Walkback (VW), on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN and CelebA datasets, demonstrating superior samples compared to earlier attempts to learn a transition operator. We also show that although each rapid training trajectory is limited to a finite but variable number of steps, our transition operator continues to generate good samples well past the length of such trajectories, thereby demonstrating the match of its non-equilibrium stationary distribution to the data distribution. Source Code: http://…/walkback_nips17 |
| Variational Wasserstein Clustering | We propose a new clustering method based on optimal transportation. We solve optimal transportation with variational principles and investigate the use of power diagrams as transportation plans for aggregating arbitrary domains into a fixed number of clusters. We iteratively drive centroids through target domains while maintaining the minimum clustering energy by adjusting the power diagrams. Thus, we simultaneously pursue clustering and the Wasserstein distances between centroids and target domains, resulting in a robust measure-preserving mapping. In general, there are two approaches for solving optimal transportation problem — Kantorovich’s v.s. Brenier’s. While most researchers focus on Kantorovich’s approach, we propose a solution to clustering problem following Brenier’s approach and achieve a competitive result with the state-of-the-art method. We demonstrate our applications to different areas such as domain adaptation, remeshing, and representation learning on synthetic and real data. |
| Varimax Rotation | In statistics, a varimax rotation is used to simplify the expression of a particular sub-space in terms of just a few major items each. The actual coordinate system is unchanged, it is the orthogonal basis that is being rotated to align with those coordinates. The sub-space found with principal component analysis or factor analysis is expressed as a dense basis with many non-zero weights which makes it hard to interpret. Varimax is so called because it maximizes the sum of the variances of the squared loadings (squared correlations between variables and factors). Preserving orthogonality requires that it is a rotation that leaves the sub-space invariant. Intuitively, this is achieved if, (a) any given variable has a high loading on a single factor but near-zero loadings on the remaining factors and if (b) any given factor is constituted by only a few variables with very high loadings on this factor while the remaining variables have near-zero loadings on this factor. If these conditions hold, the factor loading matrix is said to have “simple structure,” and varimax rotation brings the loading matrix closer to such simple structure (as much as the data allow). From the perspective of individuals measured on the variables, varimax seeks a basis that most economically represents each individual – that is, each individual can be well described by a linear combination of only a few basis functions. |
| VATEX | We present a new large-scale multilingual video description dataset, VATEX, which contains over 41,250 videos and 825,000 captions in both English and Chinese. Among the captions, there are over 206,000 English-Chinese parallel translation pairs. Compared to the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset, VATEX is multilingual, larger, linguistically complex, and more diverse in terms of both video and natural language descriptions. We also introduce two tasks for video-and-language research based on VATEX: (1) Multilingual Video Captioning, aimed at describing a video in various languages with a compact unified captioning model, and (2) Video-guided Machine Translation, to translate a source language description into the target language using the video information as additional spatiotemporal context. Extensive experiments on the VATEX dataset show that, first, the unified multilingual model can not only produce both English and Chinese descriptions for a video more efficiently, but also offer improved performance over the monolingual models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the spatiotemporal video context can be effectively utilized to align source and target languages and thus assist machine translation. In the end, we discuss the potentials of using VATEX for other video-and-language research. |
| VCExplorer | Graphs have been widely used to model different information networks, such as the Web, biological networks and social networks (e.g. Twitter). Due to the size and complexity of these graphs, how to explore and utilize these graphs has become a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose, VCExplorer, a new interactive graph exploration framework that integrates the strengths of graph visualization and graph summarization. Unlike existing graph visualization tools where vertices of a graph may be clustered into a smaller collection of super/virtual vertices, VCExplorer displays a small number of actual source graph vertices (called hubs) and summaries of the information between these vertices. We refer to such a graph as a HA-graph (Hub-based Aggregation Graph). This allows users to appreciate the relationship between the hubs, rather than super/virtual vertices. Users can navigate through the HA- graph by ‘drilling down’ into the summaries between hubs to display more hubs. We illustrate how the graph aggregation techniques can be integrated into the exploring framework as the consolidated information to users. In addition, we propose efficient graph aggregation algorithms over multiple subgraphs via computation sharing. Extensive experimental evaluations have been conducted using both real and synthetic datasets and the results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of VCExplorer for exploration. |
| vChain | Blockchains have recently been under the spotlight due to the boom of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. There is an increasing demand for querying the data stored in a blockchain database. To ensure query integrity, the user can maintain the entire blockchain database and query the data locally. However, this approach is not economic, if not infeasible, because of the blockchain’s huge data size and considerable maintenance costs. In this paper, we take the first step toward investigating the problem of verifiable query processing over blockchain databases. We propose a novel framework, called vChain, that alleviates the storage and computing costs of the user and employs verifiable queries to guarantee the results’ integrity. To support verifiable Boolean range queries, we propose an accumulator-based authenticated data structure that enables dynamic aggregation over arbitrary query attributes. Two new indexes are further developed to aggregate intra-block and inter-block data records for efficient query verification. We also propose an inverted prefix tree structure to accelerate the processing of a large number of subscription queries simultaneously. Security analysis and empirical study validate the robustness and practicality of the proposed techniques. |
| Vector Autoregression (VAR) |
➘ “Vector Autoregressive Model” |
| Vector Autoregressive Model (VAR) |
Vector autoregression (VAR) is an econometric model used to capture the linear interdependencies among multiple time series. VAR models generalize the univariate autoregression (AR) models by allowing for more than one evolving variable. All variables in a VAR are treated symmetrically in a structural sense (although the estimated quantitative response coefficients will not in general be the same); each variable has an equation explaining its evolution based on its own lags and the lags of the other model variables. VAR modeling does not require as much knowledge about the forces influencing a variable as do structural models with simultaneous equations: The only prior knowledge required is a list of variables which can be hypothesized to affect each other intertemporally. bvarsv,graphicalVAR,mlVAR |
| Vector Field Based Neural Network | A novel Neural Network architecture is proposed using the mathematically and physically rich idea of vector fields as hidden layers to perform nonlinear transformations in the data. The data points are interpreted as particles moving along a flow defined by the vector field which intuitively represents the desired movement to enable classification. The architecture moves the data points from their original configuration to anew one following the streamlines of the vector field with the objective of achieving a final configuration where classes are separable. An optimization problem is solved through gradient descent to learn this vector field. |
| Vector Fields Neural Network (VFNN) |
This work begins by establishing a mathematical formalization between different geometrical interpretations of Neural Networks, providing a first contribution. From this starting point, a new interpretation is explored, using the idea of implicit vector fields moving data as particles in a flow. A new architecture, Vector Fields Neural Networks (VFNN), is proposed based on this interpretation, with the vector field becoming explicit. A specific implementation of the VFNN using Euler’s method to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and gaussian vector fields is tested. The first experiments present visual results remarking the important features of the new architecture and providing another contribution with the geometrically interpretable regularization of model parameters. Then, the new architecture is evaluated for different hyperparameters and inputs, with the objective of evaluating the influence on model performance, computational time, and complexity. The VFNN model is compared against the known basic models Naive Bayes, Feed Forward Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines(SVM), showing comparable, or better, results for different datasets. Finally, the conclusion provides many new questions and ideas for improvement of the model that can be used to increase model performance. |
| Vector Generalized Additive Model (VGAM) |
Vector smoothing is used to extend the class of generalized additive models in a very natural way to include a class of multivariate regression models. The resulting models are called `vector generalized additive models’. The class of models for which the methodology gives generalized additive extensions includes the multiple logistic regression model for nominal responses, the continuation ratio model and the proportional and non-proportional odds models for ordinal responses, and the bivariate probit and bivariate logistic models for correlated binary responses. They may also be applied to generalized estimating equations. VGAM |
| Vector Generalized Linear Model (VGLM) |
VGAM |
| Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embedding (VLAWE) |
In this paper, we propose a novel representation for text documents based on aggregating word embedding vectors into document embeddings. Our approach is inspired by the Vector of Locally-Aggregated Descriptors used for image representation, and it works as follows. First, the word embeddings gathered from a collection of documents are clustered by k-means in order to learn a codebook of semnatically-related word embeddings. Each word embedding is then associated to its nearest cluster centroid (codeword). The Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE) representation of a document is then computed by accumulating the differences between each codeword vector and each word vector (from the document) associated to the respective codeword. We plug the VLAWE representation, which is learned in an unsupervised manner, into a classifier and show that it is useful for a diverse set of text classification tasks. We compare our approach with a broad range of recent state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, we obtain a considerable improvement on the Movie Review data set, reporting an accuracy of 93.3%, which represents an absolute gain of 10% over the state-of-the-art approach. |
| Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) |
Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE), differs from VAEs in two key ways: the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent representation, we incorporate ideas from vector quantisation (VQ). Using the VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of ‘posterior collapse’ — where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful autoregressive decoder — typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes, providing further evidence of the utility of the learnt representations. |
| Vector Quantization (VQ) |
Vector quantization (VQ) is a classical quantization technique from signal processing which allows the modeling of probability density functions by the distribution of prototype vectors. It was originally used for data compression. It works by dividing a large set of points (vectors) into groups having approximately the same number of points closest to them. Each group is represented by its centroid point, as in k-means and some other clustering algorithms. The density matching property of vector quantization is powerful, especially for identifying the density of large and high-dimensioned data. Since data points are represented by the index of their closest centroid, commonly occurring data have low error, and rare data high error. This is why VQ is suitable for lossy data compression. It can also be used for lossy data correction and density estimation. Vector quantization is based on the competitive learning paradigm, so it is closely related to the self-organizing map model. |
| Vector Space Model (VSM) |
Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents (and any objects, in general) as vectors of identifiers, such as, for example, index terms. It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and relevancy rankings. Its first use was in the SMART Information Retrieval System. |
| Vega | Vega is a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format, and generate views using HTML5 Canvas or SVG. Interactive Data Visualization with Vega |
| vega.js | Vega is a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. With Vega you can describe data visualizations in a JSON format, and generate interactive views using either HTML5 Canvas or SVG. |
| Vega-Lite | We present Vega-Lite, a high-level grammar that enables rapid specification of interactive data visualizations. Vega-Lite combines a traditional grammar of graphics, providing visual encoding rules and a composition algebra for layered and multi-view displays, with a novel grammar of interaction. Users specify interactive semantics by composing selections. In Vega-Lite, a selection is an abstraction that defines input event processing, points of interest, and a predicate function for inclusion testing. Selections parameterize visual encodings by serving as input data, defining scale extents, or by driving conditional logic. The Vega-Lite compiler automatically synthesizes requisite data flow and event handling logic, which users can override for further customization. In contrast to existing reactive specifications, Vega-Lite selections decompose an interaction design into concise, enumerable semantic units. We evaluate Vega-Lite through a range of examples, demonstrating succinct specification of both customized interaction methods and common techniques such as panning, zooming, and linked selection. |
| Vehicle Transfer Generative Adversarial Network (VTGAN) |
Vehicle re-identification (reID) is to identify a target vehicle in different cameras with non-overlapping views. When deploy the well-trained model to a new dataset directly, there is a severe performance drop because of differences among datasets named domain bias. To address this problem, this paper proposes an domain adaptation framework which contains an image-to-image translation network named vehicle transfer generative adversarial network (VTGAN) and an attention-based feature learning network (ATTNet). VTGAN could make images from the source domain (well-labeled) have the style of target domain (unlabeled) and preserve identity information of source domain. To further improve the domain adaptation ability for various backgrounds, ATTNet is proposed to train generated images with the attention structure for vehicle reID. Comprehensive experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on VehicleID dataset. |
| VelocityGAN | Acoustic- and elastic-waveform inversion is an important and widely used method to reconstruct subsurface velocity image. Waveform inversion is a typical non-linear and ill-posed inverse problem. Existing physics-driven computational methods for solving waveform inversion suffer from the cycle skipping and local minima issues, and not to mention solving waveform inversion is computationally expensive. In this paper, we developed a real-time data-driven technique, VelocityGAN, to accurately reconstruct subsurface velocities. Our VelocityGAN is an end-to-end framework which can generate high-quality velocity images directly from the raw seismic waveform data. A series of numerical experiments are conducted on the synthetic seismic reflection data to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of VelocityGAN. We not only compare it with existing physics-driven approaches but also choose some deep learning frameworks as our data-driven baselines. The experiment results show that VelocityGAN outperforms the physics-driven waveform inversion methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance among data-driven baselines. |
| Velox | To support complex data-intensive applications such as personalized recommendations, targeted advertising, and intelligent services, the data management community has focused heavily on the design of systems to support training complex models on large datasets. Unfortunately, the design of these systems largely ignores a critical component of the overall analytics process: the deployment and serving of models at scale. We present Velox, a new component of the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack. Velox is a data management system for facilitating the next steps in real-world, large-scale analytics pipelines: online model management, maintenance, and prediction serving. Velox provides end-user applications and services with a low-latency, intuitive interface to models, transforming the raw statistical models currently trained using existing offline large-scale compute frameworks into full-blown, end-to-end data products. To provide up-to-date results for these complex models, Velox also facilitates lightweight online model maintenance and selection (i.e., dynamic weighting). Velox has the ability to span online and offline systems, to adaptively adjust model materialization strategies, and to exploit inherent statistical properties such as model error tolerance, all while operating at ‘Big Data’ scale. http://…/veloxampcamp5-final |
| Venue Analytics | We present a method for automatically organizing and evaluating the quality of different publishing venues in Computer Science. Since this method only requires paper publication data as its input, we can demonstrate our method on a large portion of the DBLP dataset, spanning 50 years, with millions of authors and thousands of publishing venues. By formulating venue authorship as a regression problem and targeting metrics of interest, we obtain venue scores for every conference and journal in our dataset. The obtained scores can also provide a per-year model of conference quality, showing how fields develop and change over time. Additionally, these venue scores can be used to evaluate individual academic authors and academic institutions. We show that using venue scores to evaluate both authors and institutions produces quantitative measures that are comparable to approaches using citations or peer assessment. In contrast to many other existing evaluation metrics, our use of large-scale, openly available data enables this approach to be repeatable and transparent. |
| VerdictDB | Despite 25 years of research in academia, approximate query processing (AQP) has had little industrial adoption. One of the major causes for this slow adoption is the reluctance of traditional vendors to make radical changes to their legacy codebases, and the preoccupation of newer vendors (e.g., SQL-on-Hadoop products) with implementing standard features. On the other hand, the few AQP engines that are available are each tied to a specific platform and require users to completely abandon their existing databases—an unrealistic expectation given the infancy of the AQP technology. Therefore, we argue that a universal solution is needed: a database-agnostic approximation engine that will widen the reach of this emerging technology across various platforms. Our proposal, called VerdictDB, uses a middleware architecture that requires no changes to the backend database, and thus, can work with all off-the-shelf engines. Operating at the driver-level, VerdictDB intercepts analytical queries issued to the database and rewrites them into another query that, if executed by any standard relational engine, will yield sufficient information for computing an approximate answer. VerdictDB uses the returned result set to compute an approximate answer and error estimates, which are then passed on to the user or application. However, lack of access to the query execution layer introduces significant challenges in terms of generality, correctness, and efficiency. This paper shows how VerdictDB overcomes these challenges and delivers up to 171 times speedup (18.45 times on average) for a variety of existing engines, such as Impala, Spark SQL, and Amazon Redshift while incurring less than 2.6% relative error. |
| VERIFAI | We present VERIFAI, a software toolkit for the formal design and analysis of systems that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) components. VERIFAI particularly seeks to address challenges with applying formal methods to perception and ML components, including those based on neural networks, and to model and analyze system behavior in the presence of environment uncertainty. We describe the initial version of VERIFAI which centers on simulation guided by formal models and specifications. Several use cases are illustrated with examples, including temporal-logic falsification, model-based systematic fuzz testing, parameter synthesis, counterexample analysis, and data set augmentation. |
| Verifier of Tree Ensemble (VoTE) |
Formal Verification of Input-Output Mappings of Tree Ensembles |
| Verity | Integrity and security of the data in database systems are typically maintained with access control policies and firewalls. However, insider attacks — where someone with an intimate knowledge of the system and administrative privileges tampers with the data — pose a unique challenge. Measures like append only logging prove to be insufficient because an attacker with administrative privileges can alter logs and login records to eliminate the trace of attack, thus making insider attacks hard to detect. In this paper, we propose Verity — first of a kind system to the best of our knowledge. Verity serves as a dataless framework by which any blockchain network can be used to store fixed-length metadata about tuples from any SQL database, without complete migration of the database. Verity uses a formalism for parsing SQL queries and query results to check the respective tuples’ integrity using blockchains to detect insider attacks. We have implemented our technique using Hyperledger Fabric, Composer REST API, and SQLite database. Using TPC-H data and SQL queries of varying complexity and types, our experiments demonstrate that any overhead of integrity checking remains constant per tuple in a query’s results, and scales linearly. |
| Versatile Tensor Accelerator (VTA) |
Hardware acceleration is an enabler for ubiquitous and efficient deep learning. With hardware accelerators being introduced in datacenter and edge devices, it is time to acknowledge that hardware specialization is central to the deep learning system stack. This technical report presents the Versatile Tensor Accelerator (VTA), an open, generic, and customizable deep learning accelerator design. VTA is a programmable accelerator that exposes a RISC-like programming abstraction to describe operations at the tensor level. We designed VTA to expose the most salient and common characteristics of mainstream deep learning accelerators, such as tensor operations, DMA load/stores, and explicit compute/memory arbitration. VTA is more than a standalone accelerator design: it’s an end-to-end solution that includes drivers, a JIT runtime, and an optimizing compiler stack based on TVM. The current release of VTA includes a behavioral hardware simulator, as well as the infrastructure to deploy VTA on low-cost FPGA development boards for fast prototyping. By extending the TVM stack with a customizable, and open source deep learning hardware accelerator design, we are exposing a transparent end-to-end deep learning stack from the high-level deep learning framework, down to the actual hardware design and implementation. This forms a truly end-to-end, from software-to-hardware open source stack for deep learning systems. |
| VERtex Similarity Embedding (VERSE) |
Embedding a web-scale information network into a low-dimensional vector space facilitates tasks such as link prediction, classification, and visualization. Past research has addressed the problem of extracting such embeddings by adopting methods from words to graphs, without defining a clearly comprehensible graph-related objective. Yet, as we show, the objectives used in past works implicitly utilize similarity measures among graph nodes. In this paper, we carry the similarity orientation of previous works to its logical conclusion; we propose VERtex Similarity Embeddings (VERSE), a simple, versatile, and memory-efficient method that derives graph embeddings explicitly calibrated to preserve the distributions of a selected vertex-to-vertex similarity measure. VERSE learns such embeddings by training a single-layer neural network. While its default, scalable version does so via sampling similarity information, we also develop a variant using the full information per vertex. Our experimental study on standard benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrates that VERSE, instantiated with diverse similarity measures, outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and recall in major data mining tasks and supersedes them in time and space efficiency, while the scalable sampling-based variant achieves equally good results as the non-scalable full variant. |
| Vertex Similarity Method | We consider methods for quantifying the similarity of vertices in networks. We propose a measure of similarity based on the concept that two vertices are similar if their immediate neighbors in the network are themselves similar. This leads to a self-consistent matrix formulation of similarity that can be evaluated iteratively using only a knowledge of the adjacency matrix of the network. We test our similarity measure on computer-generated networks for which the expected results are known, and on a number of real-world networks. |
| Vertex-Diminished Random Walk (VDRW) |
Imbalanced data widely exists in many high-impact applications. An example is in air traffic control, where we aim to identify the leading indicators for each type of accident cause from historical records. Among all three types of accident causes, historical records with ‘personnel issues’ are much more than the other two types (‘aircraft issues’ and ‘environmental issues’) combined. Thus, the resulting dataset is highly imbalanced, and can be naturally modeled as a network. Up until now, most existing work on imbalanced data analysis focused on the classification setting, and very little is devoted to learning the node representation from imbalanced networks. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose Vertex-Diminished Random Walk (VDRW) for imbalanced network analysis. The key idea is to encourage the random particle to walk within the same class by adjusting the transition probabilities each step. It resembles the existing Vertex Reinforced Random Walk in terms of the dynamic nature of the transition probabilities, as well as some convergence properties. However, it is more suitable for analyzing imbalanced networks as it leads to more separable node representations in the embedding space. Then, based on VDRW, we propose a semi-supervised network representation learning framework named ImVerde for imbalanced networks, in which context sampling uses VDRW and the label information to create node-context pairs, and balanced-batch sampling adopts a simple under-sampling method to balance these pairs in different classes. Experimental results demonstrate that ImVerde based on VDRW outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for learning network representation from imbalanced data. |
| Vertical Hoeffding Tree (VHT) |
The Vertical Hoeffding Tree (VHT) is a distributed extension of the VFDT (Domingos and Hulten, 2000). The VHT uses vertical parallelism to split the workload across several machines. Vertical parallelism leverages the parallelism across attributes in the same example, rather than across different examples in the stream. In practice, each training example is routed through the tree model to a leaf. There, the example is split into its constituting attributes, and each attribute is sent to a different Processor instance that keeps track of sufficient statistics. This architecture has two main advantages over one based on horizontal parallelism. First, attribute counters are not replicated across several machines, thus reducing the memory footprint. Second, the computation of the fitness of an attribute for a split decision (via, e.g., entropy or information gain) can be performed in parallel. The drawback is that in order to get good performance, there must be sufficient inherent parallelism in the data. That is, the VHT works best for sparse data (e.g, bag-of-words models). Vertical Hoeffding Tree (VHT) classifier is a distributed classifier that utilizes vertical parallelism on top of the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) or Hoeffding Tree classifier. Hoeffding Tree or VFDT is the standard decision tree algorithm for data stream classification. VFDT uses the Hoeffding bound to decide the minimum number of arriving instances to achieve certain level of confidence in splitting the node. This confidence level determines how close the statistics between the attribute chosen by VFDT and the attribute chosen by decision tree for batch learning. For a more comprehensive summary of VFDT, read chapter 3 of ‘Data Stream Mining: A Practical Approach’. http://…/StreamMining.pdf http://…/p71-domingos.pdf http://…/arinto-emdc-thesis.pdf https://…able-advanced-massive-online-analysis.pdf |
| Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) |
Hoeffding Tree or VFDT is the standard decision tree algorithm for data stream classification. VFDT uses the Hoeffding bound to decide the minimum number of arriving instances to achieve certain level of confidence in splitting the node. This confidence level determines how close the statistics between the attribute chosen by VFDT and the attribute chosen by decision tree for batch learning. ➚ “Hoeffding Tree” https://…/Vertical-Hoeffding-Tree-Classifier.html |
| Very Good Importance Sampling (VGIS) |
loo |
| Very Sparse Tucker Factorization (VeST) |
Given a large tensor, how can we decompose it to sparse core tensor and factor matrices such that it is easier to interpret the results? How can we do this without reducing the accuracy? Existing approaches either output dense results or give low accuracy. In this paper, we propose VeST, a tensor factorization method for partially observable data to output a very sparse core tensor and factor matrices. VeST performs initial decomposition, determines unimportant entries in the decomposition results, removes the unimportant entries, and carefully updates the remaining entries. To determine unimportant entries, we define and use entry-wise ‘responsibility’ for the decomposed results. The entries are updated iteratively in a coordinate descent manner in parallel for scalable computation. Extensive experiments show that our method VeST is at least 2.2 times more sparse and at least 2.8 times more accurate compared to competitors. Moreover, VeST is scalable in terms of input order, dimension, and the number of observable entries. Thanks to VeST, we successfully interpret the result of real-world tensor data based on the sparsity pattern of the resulting factor matrices. |
| Veto Interval Graphs (VI Graphs) |
We introduce a variation of interval graphs, called veto interval (VI) graphs. A VI graph is represented by a set of closed intervals, each containing a point called a veto mark. The edge $ab$ is in the graph if the intervals corresponding to the vertices $a$ and $b$ intersect, and neither contains the veto mark of the other. We find families of graphs which are VI graphs, and prove results towards characterizing the maximum chromatic number of a VI graph. We define and prove similar results about several related graph families, including unit VI graphs, midpoint unit VI (MUVI) graphs, and single and double approval graphs. We also highlight a relationship between approval graphs and a family of tolerance graphs. |
| Vicious Circle Principle | The vicious circle principle is a principle that was endorsed by many predicativist mathematicians in the early 20th century to prevent contradictions. The principle states that no object or property may be introduced by a definition that depends on that object or property itself. In addition to ruling out definitions that are explicitly circular (like ‘an object has property P iff it is not next to anything that has property P’), this principle rules out definitions that quantify over domains which include the entity being defined. Thus, it blocks Russell’s paradox, which defines a set S that contains all sets that don’t contain themselves. This definition is blocked because it defines a new set in terms of the totality of all sets, of which this new set would itself be a member. However, it also blocks one standard definition of the natural numbers. First, we define a property as being ‘hereditary’ if, whenever a number n has the property, so does n + 1. Then we say that x has the property of being a natural number if and only if it has every hereditary property that 0 has. This definition is blocked, because it defines ‘natural number’ in terms of the totality of all hereditary properties, but ‘natural number’ itself would be such a hereditary property, so the definition is circular in this sense. |
| Video Barrage | We introduce the task of automatic live commenting. Live commenting, which is also called `video barrage’, is an emerging feature on online video sites that allows real-time comments from viewers to fly across the screen like bullets or roll at the right side of the screen. The live comments are a mixture of opinions for the video and the chit chats with other comments. Automatic live commenting requires AI agents to comprehend the videos and interact with human viewers who also make the comments, so it is a good testbed of an AI agent’s ability of dealing with both dynamic vision and language. In this work, we construct a large-scale live comment dataset with 2,361 videos and 895,929 live comments. Then, we introduce two neural models to generate live comments based on the visual and textual contexts, which achieve better performance than previous neural baselines such as the sequence-to-sequence model. Finally, we provide a retrieval-based evaluation protocol for automatic live commenting where the model is asked to sort a set of candidate comments based on the log-likelihood score, and evaluated on metrics such as mean-reciprocal-rank. Putting it all together, we demonstrate the first `LiveBot’. |
| Video Ladder Network (VLN) |
We present the Video Ladder Network (VLN) for video prediction. VLN is a neural encoder-decoder model augmented by both recurrent and feedforward lateral connections at all layers. The model achieves competitive results on the Moving MNIST dataset while having very simple structure and providing fast inference. |
| Video to Behaviour (ViBe) |
Learning from demonstration (LfD) is useful in settings where hand-coding behaviour or a reward function is impractical. It has succeeded in a wide range of problems but typically relies on artificially generated demonstrations or specially deployed sensors and has not generally been able to leverage the copious demonstrations available in the wild: those that capture behaviour that was occurring anyway using sensors that were already deployed for another purpose, e.g., traffic camera footage capturing demonstrations of natural behaviour of vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. We propose video to behaviour (ViBe), a new approach to learning models of road user behaviour that requires as input only unlabelled raw video data of a traffic scene collected from a single, monocular, uncalibrated camera with ordinary resolution. Our approach calibrates the camera, detects relevant objects, tracks them through time, and uses the resulting trajectories to perform LfD, yielding models of naturalistic behaviour. We apply ViBe to raw videos of a traffic intersection and show that it can learn purely from videos, without additional expert knowledge. |
| Video Transformer Network (VTN) |
In this work we present a new efficient approach to Human Action Recognition called Video Transformer Network (VTN). It leverages the latest advances in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing and applies them to video understanding. The proposed method allows us to create lightweight CNN models that achieve high accuracy and real-time speed using just an RGB mono camera and general purpose CPU. Furthermore, we explain how to improve accuracy by distilling from multiple models with different modalities into a single model. We conduct a comparison with state-of-the-art methods and show that our approach performs on par with most of them on famous Action Recognition datasets. We benchmark the inference time of the models using the modern inference framework and argue that our approach compares favorably with other methods in terms of speed/accuracy trade-off, running at 56 FPS on CPU. The models and the training code are available. |
| VideoCapsuleNet | The recent advances in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown extremely good results for video human action classification, however, action detection is still a challenging problem. The current action detection approaches follow a complex pipeline which involves multiple tasks such as tube proposals, optical flow, and tube classification. In this work, we present a more elegant solution for action detection based on the recently developed capsule network. We propose a 3D capsule network for videos, called VideoCapsuleNet: a unified network for action detection which can jointly perform pixel-wise action segmentation along with action classification. The proposed network is a generalization of capsule network from 2D to 3D, which takes a sequence of video frames as input. The 3D generalization drastically increases the number of capsules in the network, making capsule routing computationally expensive. We introduce capsule-pooling in the convolutional capsule layer to address this issue which makes the voting algorithm tractable. The routing-by-agreement in the network inherently models the action representations and various action characteristics are captured by the predicted capsules. This inspired us to utilize the capsules for action localization and the class-specific capsules predicted by the network are used to determine a pixel-wise localization of actions. The localization is further improved by parameterized skip connections with the convolutional capsule layers and the network is trained end-to-end with a classification as well as localization loss. The proposed network achieves sate-of-the-art performance on multiple action detection datasets including UCF-Sports, J-HMDB, and UCF-101 (24 classes) with an impressive ~20% improvement on UCF-101 and ~15% improvement on J-HMDB in terms of v-mAP scores. |
| VieClus | It is common knowledge that there is no single best strategy for graph clustering, which justifies a plethora of existing approaches. In this paper, we present a general memetic algorithm, VieClus, to tackle the graph clustering problem. This algorithm can be adapted to optimize different objective functions. A key component of our contribution are natural recombine operators that employ ensemble clusterings as well as multi-level techniques. Lastly, we combine these techniques with a scalable communication protocol, producing a system that is able to compute high-quality solutions in a short amount of time. We instantiate our scheme with local search for modularity and show that our algorithm successfully improves or reproduces all entries of the 10th DIMACS implementation~challenge under consideration using a small amount of time. |
| Vilin | We introduce an application for executing and testing different unconstrained optimization algorithms. The application contains a library of various test functions with pre-defined starting points. A several known classes of methods as well as different classes of line search procedures are covered. Each method can be tested on various test function with a chosen number of parameters. Solvers come with optimal pre-defined parameter values which simplifies the usage. Additionally, user friendly interface gives an opportunity for advanced users to use their expertise and also easily fine-tune a large number of hyper parameters for obtaining even more optimal solution. This application can be used as a tool for developing new optimization algorithms (by using simple API), as well as for testing and comparing existing ones, by using given standard library of test functions. Special care has been given in order to achieve good numerical stability of all vital parts of the application. The application is implemented in programming language Matlab with very helpful gui support. |
| VIoLET | IoT deployments have been growing manifold, encompassing sensors, networks, edge, fog and cloud resources. Despite the intense interest from researchers and practitioners, most do not have access to large-scale IoT testbeds for validation. Simulation environments that allow analytical modeling are a poor substitute for evaluating software platforms or application workloads in realistic computing environments. Here, we propose VIoLET, a virtual environment for defining and launching large-scale IoT deployments within cloud VMs. It offers a declarative model to specify container-based compute resources that match the performance of the native edge, fog and cloud devices using Docker. These can be inter-connected by complex topologies on which private/public networks, and bandwidth and latency rules are enforced. Users can configure synthetic sensors for data generation on these devices as well. We validate VIoLET for deployments with > 400 devices and > 1500 device-cores, and show that the virtual IoT environment closely matches the expected compute and network performance at modest costs. This fills an important gap between IoT simulators and real deployments. |
| VIPE | This paper presents a new interactive opinion mining tool that helps users to classify large sets of short texts originated from Web opinion polls, technical forums or Twitter. From a manual multi-label pre-classification of a very limited text subset, a learning algorithm predicts the labels of the remaining texts of the corpus and the texts most likely associated to a selected label. Using a fast matrix factorization, the algorithm is able to handle large corpora and is well-adapted to interactivity by integrating the corrections proposed by the users on the fly. Experimental results on classical datasets of various sizes and feedbacks of users from marketing services of the telecommunication company Orange confirm the quality of the obtained results. |
| ViPIOS | For an increasing number of data intensive scientific applications, parallel I/O concepts are a major performance issue. Tackling this issue, we develop an input/output system designed for highly efficient, scalable and conveniently usable parallel I/O on distributed memory systems. The main focus of this research is the parallel I/O runtime system support provided for software-generated programs produced by parallelizing compilers in the context of High Performance FORTRAN efforts. Specifically, our design aims for the Vienna Fortran Compilation System. In our research project we investigate the I/O problem from a runtime system support perspective. We focus on the design of an advanced parallel I/O support, called ViPIOS (VIenna Parallel I/O System), to be targeted by language compilers supporting the same programming model like High Performance Fortran (HPF). The ViPIOS design is partly influenced by the concepts of parallel database technology. At the beginning of the project we developed a formal model, which forms a theoretical framework on which the ViPIOS design is based. This model describes the mapping of the problem specific data space starting from the application program data structures down to the physical layout on disk across several intermediate representation levels. Based on this formal model we designed and developed an I/O runtime system, ViPIOS, which provides support for several issues, as – parallel access to files for read/write operations, – optimization of data-layout on disks, – redistribution of data stored on disks, – communication of out-of-core (OOC) data, and – many optimizations including data prefetching from disks based on the access pattern knowledge extracted from the program by the compiler or provided by a user specification. |
| Viral Search | The article, after a brief introduction on genetic algorithms and their functioning, presents a kind of genetic algorithm called Viral Search. We present the key concepts, we formally derive the algorithm and we perform numerical tests designed to illustrate the potential and limits. |
| VIREL | Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) has become an exciting direction of research owing to powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference becoming applicable to RL. However, due to their formulation, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges for learning optimal policies, for example, the absence of mode capturing behaviour in pseudo-likelihood methods and difficulties in optimisation of learning objective in maximum entropy RL based approaches. We propose VIREL, a novel, theoretically grounded probabilistic inference framework for RL that utilises the action-value function in a parametrised form to capture future dynamics of the underlying Markov decision process. Owing to it’s generality, our framework lends itself to current advances in variational inference. Applying the variational expectation-maximisation algorithm to our framework, we show that actor-critic algorithm can be reduced to expectation-maximization. We derive a family of methods from our framework, including state-of-the-art methods based on soft value functions. We evaluate two actor-critic algorithms derived from this family, which perform on par with soft actor critic, demonstrating that our framework offers a promising perspective on RL as inference. |
| Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) |
To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie’s generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control. |
| Virtual Conditional GAN (vcGAN) |
When trained on multimodal image datasets, normal Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are usually outperformed by class-conditional GANs and ensemble GANs, but conditional GANs is restricted to labeled datasets and ensemble GANs lack efficiency. We propose a novel GAN variant called virtual conditional GAN (vcGAN) which is not only an ensemble GAN with multiple generative paths while adding almost zero network parameters, but also a conditional GAN that can be trained on unlabeled datasets without explicit clustering steps or objectives other than the adversary loss. Inside the vcGAN’s generator, a learnable “analog-to-digital converter (ADC)’ module maps a slice of the inputted multivariate Gaussian noise to discrete/digital noise (virtual label), according to which a selector selects the corresponding generative path to produce the sample. All the generative paths share the same decoder network while in each path the decoder network is fed with a concatenation of a different pre-computed amplified one-hot vector and the inputted Gaussian noise. We conducted a lot of experiments on several balanced/imbalanced image datasets to demonstrate that vcGAN converges faster and achieves improved Frech\’et Inception Distance (FID). In addition, we show the training byproduct that the ADC in vcGAN learned the categorical probability of each mode and that each generative path generates samples of specific mode, which enables class-conditional sampling. Codes are available at \url{https://…/vcgan} |
| Virtual Dataset Normalization | Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) thrive in recent years in which Batch Normalization (BN) plays an indispensable role. However, it has been observed that BN is costly due to the reduction operations. In this paper, we propose alleviating this problem through sampling only a small fraction of data for normalization at each iteration. Specifically, we model it as a statistical sampling problem and identify that by sampling less correlated data, we can largely reduce the requirement of the number of data for statistics estimation in BN, which directly simplifies the reduction operations. Based on this conclusion, we propose two sampling strategies, ‘Batch Sampling’ (randomly select several samples from each batch) and ‘Feature Sampling’ (randomly select a small patch from each feature map of all samples), that take both computational efficiency and sample correlation into consideration. Furthermore, we introduce an extremely simple variant of BN, termed as Virtual Dataset Normalization (VDN), that can normalize the activations well with few synthetical random samples. All the proposed methods are evaluated on various datasets and networks, where an overall training speedup by up to 20% on GPU is practically achieved without the support of any specialized libraries, and the loss on accuracy and convergence rate are negligible. Finally, we extend our work to the ‘micro-batch normalization’ problem and yield comparable performance with existing approaches at the case of tiny batch size. |
| vis.js | A dynamic, browser based visualization library. The library is designed to be easy to use, to handle large amounts of dynamic data, and to enable manipulation of and interaction with the data. The library consists of the components DataSet, Timeline, Network, Graph2d and Graph3d. |
| Visual Analog Scale (VAS) |
The visual analogue scale or visual analog scale (VAS) is a psychometric response scale which can be used in questionnaires. It is a measurement instrument for subjective characteristics or attitudes that cannot be directly measured. When responding to a VAS item, respondents specify their level of agreement to a statement by indicating a position along a continuous line between two end-points. http://…/jcn_10_706.pdf ordinalCont |
| Visual Analytics | Visual analytics is “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by visual interactive interfaces.” It can attack certain problems whose size, complexity, and need for closely coupled human and machine analysis may make them otherwise intractable. Visual analytics advances science and technology developments in analytical reasoning, interaction, data transformations and representations for computation and visualization, analytic reporting, and technology transition. As a research agenda, visual analytics brings together several scientific and technical communities from computer science, information visualization, cognitive and perceptual sciences, interactive design, graphic design, and social sciences. |
| Visual Character-Enhanced Word Embedding (VCWE) |
Chinese is a logographic writing system, and the shape of Chinese characters contain rich syntactic and semantic information. In this paper, we propose a model to learn Chinese word embeddings via two-level composition: (1) a convolutional neural network to extract the intra-character compositionality from the visual shape of a character; (2) a recurrent neural network with self-attention to compose character representation into word embeddings. The word embeddings along with the network parameters are learned in the Skip-Gram framework. Evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our model on four tasks: word similarity, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging. |
| Visual Communication (VC) |
Visual communication is communication through visual aid and is described as the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Visual communication in part or whole relies on vision, and is primarily presented or expressed with two dimensional images, it includes: signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, Industrial Design, Advertising, Animation colour and electronic resources. It also explores the idea that a visual message accompanying text has a greater power to inform, educate, or persuade a person or audience. |
| Visual Data Management System (VDMS) |
We introduce the Visual Data Management System (VDMS), a data management solution that enables efficient access of big-visual-data to support visual analytics. This is achieved by searching for relevant visual data via metadata stored as a graph, as well as enabling faster access to visual data through new machine-friendly storage formats. VDMS differs from existing large scale photo serving, video streaming, and textual big-data data management systems due to its primary focus on supporting machine learning and data analytics pipelines that use visual data, and in its treatment of visual data such as images, videos, and feature vectors as first class entities. We describe how to use VDMS via its user friendly interface as well as how it enables rich and efficient vision analytics through a machine learning pipeline for processing medical images. We show the improved performance of 2x in complex queries over a comparable set-up. |
| Visual Data Selection and Summarization (Vis-DSS) |
With increasing amounts of visual data being created in the form of videos and images, visual data selection and summarization are becoming ever increasing problems. We present Vis-DSS, an open-source toolkit for Visual Data Selection and Summarization. Vis-DSS implements a framework of models for summarization and data subset selection using submodular functions, which are becoming increasingly popular today for these problems. We present several classes of models, capturing notions of diversity, coverage, representation and importance, along with optimization/inference and learning algorithms. Vis-DSS is the first open source toolkit for several Data selection and summarization tasks including Image Collection Summarization, Video Summarization, Training Data selection for Classification and Diversified Active Learning. We demonstrate state-of-the art performance on all these tasks, and also show how we can scale to large problems. Vis-DSS allows easy integration for applications to be built on it, also can serve as a general skeleton that can be extended to several use cases, including video and image sharing platforms for creating GIFs, image montage creation, or as a component to surveillance systems and we demonstrate this by providing a graphical user-interface (GUI) desktop app built over Qt framework. Vis-DSS is available at https://…/vis-dss |
| Visual Discourse Parsing | Text-level discourse parsing aims to unmask how two segments (or sentences) in the text are related to each other. We propose the task of Visual Discourse Parsing, which requires understanding discourse relations among scenes in a video. Here we use the term scene to refer to a subset of video frames that can better summarize the video. In order to collect a dataset for learning discourse cues from videos, one needs to manually identify the scenes from a large pool of video frames and then annotate the discourse relations between them. This is clearly a time consuming, expensive and tedious task. In this work, we propose an approach to identify discourse cues from the videos without the need to explicitly identify and annotate the scenes. We also present a novel dataset containing 310 videos and the corresponding discourse cues to evaluate our approach. We believe that many of the multi-discipline Artificial Intelligence problems such as Visual Dialog and Visual Storytelling would greatly benefit from the use of visual discourse cues. |
| Visual Intelligence (VI) |
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| Visual INteraction Effect (VINE) |
As machine learning becomes more pervasive, there is an urgent need for interpretable explanations of predictive models. Prior work has developed effective methods for visualizing global model behavior, as well as generating local (instance-specific) explanations. However, relatively little work has addressed regional explanations – how groups of similar instances behave in a complex model, and the related issue of visualizing statistical feature interactions. The lack of utilities available for these analytical needs hinders the development of models that are mission-critical, transparent, and align with social goals. We present VINE (Visual INteraction Effects), a novel algorithm to extract and visualize statistical interaction effects in black box models. We also present a novel evaluation metric for visualizations in the interpretable ML space. |
| Visual Interaction Network (VIN) |
From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future state of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains and require direct measurements of the underlying states. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions and dynamics, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. Our results demonstrate that the perceptual module and the object-based dynamics predictor module can induce factored latent representations that support accurate dynamical predictions. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments. |
| Visual Knowledge Memory Network (VKMN) |
Visual question answering (VQA) requires joint comprehension of images and natural language questions, where many questions can’t be directly or clearly answered from visual content but require reasoning from structured human knowledge with confirmation from visual content. This paper proposes visual knowledge memory network (VKMN) to address this issue, which seamlessly incorporates structured human knowledge and deep visual features into memory networks in an end-to-end learning framework. Comparing to existing methods for leveraging external knowledge for supporting VQA, this paper stresses more on two missing mechanisms. First is the mechanism for integrating visual contents with knowledge facts. VKMN handles this issue by embedding knowledge triples (subject, relation, target) and deep visual features jointly into the visual knowledge features. Second is the mechanism for handling multiple knowledge facts expanding from question and answer pairs. VKMN stores joint embedding using key-value pair structure in the memory networks so that it is easy to handle multiple facts. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves promising results on both VQA v1.0 and v2.0 benchmarks, while outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the knowledge-reasoning related questions. |
| Visual learning TO Rank (ViTOR) |
The visual appearance of a webpage carries valuable information about its quality and can be used to improve the performance of learning to rank (LTR). We introduce the Visual learning TO Rank (ViTOR) model that integrates state-of-the-art visual features extraction methods by (i) transfer learning from a pre-trained image classification model, and (ii) synthetic saliency heat maps generated from webpage snapshots. Since there is currently no public dataset for the task of LTR with visual features, we also introduce and release the ViTOR dataset, containing visually rich and diverse webpages. The ViTOR dataset consists of visual snapshots, non-visual features and relevance judgments for ClueWeb12 webpages and TREC Web Track queries. We experiment with the proposed ViTOR model on the ViTOR dataset and show that it significantly improves the performance of LTR with visual features |
| Visual Mesh | This paper proposes an enhancement of convolutional neural networks for object detection in resource-constrained robotics through a geometric input transformation called Visual Mesh. It uses object geometry to create a graph in vision space, reducing computational complexity by normalizing the pixel and feature density of objects. The experiments compare the Visual Mesh with several other fast convolutional neural networks. The results demonstrate execution times sixteen times quicker than the fastest competitor tested, while achieving outstanding accuracy. |
| Visual Predictive Checks (VPC) |
The visual predictive check (VPC) is a model diagnostic that can be used to: (i) allow comparison between alternative models, (ii) suggest model improvements, and (iii) support appropriateness of a model. The VPC is constructed from stochastic simulations from the model therefore all model components contribute and it can help in diagnosing both structural and stochastic contributions. As the VPC is being increasingly used as a key diagnostic to illustrate model appropriateness, it is important that its methodology, strengths and weaknesses be discussed by the pharmacometric community. In a typical VPC, the model is used to repeatedly (usually n≥1000) simulate observations according to the original design of the study. Based on these simulations, percentiles of the simulated data are plotted versus an independent variable, usually time since start of treatment. It is then desirable that the same percentiles are calculated and plotted for the observed data to aid comparison of predictions with observations. With suitable data a plot including the observations may be helpful by indicating the data density at different times and thus giving some indirect feel for the uncertainty in the percentiles. Apparently poor model performance where there is very sparse data may not as strongly indicate model inadequacy as poor performance with dense data. A drawback of adding all observations to the VPC, in particular for large studies, is that it may cloud the picture without making data density obvious. A possible intermediate route is to plot a random sub-sample of all observations. asVPC |
| Visual Query Detection (VQD) |
We propose Visual Query Detection (VQD), a new visual grounding task. In VQD, a system is guided by natural language to localize a \emph{variable} number of objects in an image. VQD is related to visual referring expression recognition, where the task is to localize only \emph{one} object. We describe the first dataset for VQD and we propose baseline algorithms that demonstrate the difficulty of the task compared to referring expression recognition. |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) |
Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. An Analysis of Visual Question Answering Algorithms |
| Visual Question Answering With Explanation (VQA-E) |
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset. |
| Visual Statistical Learning (VSL) |
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| VIsual Tracking via Adversarial Learning (VITAL) |
The tracking-by-detection framework consists of two stages, i.e., drawing samples around the target object in the first stage and classifying each sample as the target object or as background in the second stage. The performance of existing trackers using deep classification networks is limited by two aspects. First, the positive samples in each frame are highly spatially overlapped, and they fail to capture rich appearance variations. Second, there exists extreme class imbalance between positive and negative samples. This paper presents the VITAL algorithm to address these two problems via adversarial learning. To augment positive samples, we use a generative network to randomly generate masks, which are applied to adaptively dropout input features to capture a variety of appearance changes. With the use of adversarial learning, our network identifies the mask that maintains the most robust features of the target objects over a long temporal span. In addition, to handle the issue of class imbalance, we propose a high-order cost sensitive loss to decrease the effect of easy negative samples to facilitate training the classification network. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches. |
| Visualization of Analysis of Variance (VISOVA) |
VISOVA(VISualization Of VAriance) is a novel method for exploratory data analysis. It is basically an extension of the trellis graphics and developing their grid concept with parallel coordinates, permitting visualization of many dimensions at once. This package includes functions allowing users to perform VISOVA analysis and compare different column/variable ordering methods for making the high-dimensional structures easier to perceive even when the data is complicated. visova |
| vitrivr | The growth of multimedia collections – in terms of size, heterogeneity, and variety of media types – necessitates systems that are able to conjointly deal with several forms of media, especially when it comes to searching for particular objects. However, existing retrieval systems are organized in silos and treat different media types separately. As a consequence, retrieval across media types is either not supported at all or subject to major limitations. In this paper, we present vitrivr, a content-based multimedia information retrieval stack. As opposed to the keyword search approach implemented by most media management systems, vitrivr makes direct use of the object’s content to facilitate different types of similarity search, such as Query-by-Example or Query-by-Sketch, for and, most importantly, across different media types – namely, images, audio, videos, and 3D models. Furthermore, we introduce a new web-based user interface that enables easy-to-use, multimodal retrieval from and browsing in mixed media collections. The effectiveness of vitrivr is shown on the basis of a user study that involves different query and media types. To the best of our knowledge, the full vitrivr stack is unique in that it is the first multimedia retrieval system that seamlessly integrates support for four different types of media. As such, it paves the way towards an all-purpose, content-based multimedia information retrieval system. |
| VizNet | Researchers currently rely on ad hoc datasets to train automated visualization tools and evaluate the effectiveness of visualization designs. These exemplars often lack the characteristics of real-world datasets, and their one-off nature makes it difficult to compare different techniques. In this paper, we present VizNet: a large-scale corpus of over 31 million datasets compiled from open data repositories and online visualization galleries. On average, these datasets comprise 17 records over 3 dimensions and across the corpus, we find 51% of the dimensions record categorical data, 44% quantitative, and only 5% temporal. VizNet provides the necessary common baseline for comparing visualization design techniques, and developing benchmark models and algorithms for automating visual analysis. To demonstrate VizNet’s utility as a platform for conducting online crowdsourced experiments at scale, we replicate a prior study assessing the influence of user task and data distribution on visual encoding effectiveness, and extend it by considering an additional task: outlier detection. To contend with running such studies at scale, we demonstrate how a metric of perceptual effectiveness can be learned from experimental results, and show its predictive power across test datasets. |
| VizPacker | VizPacker is a handy tool that helps visualization developer easily design, build and preview a chart based on CVOM SDK, and auto-create a package for CVOM chart extension, which include a set of fundamental codes and files based on visualization module and data schema. VizPacker is meant to help users quickly have hands on the implementation workflow and avoid unnecessary issues-struggling. |
| VizRec | Visual representations of data (visualizations) are tools of great importance and widespread use in data analytics as they provide users visual insight to patterns in the observed data in a simple and effective way. However, since visualizations tools are applied to sample data, there is a a risk of visualizing random fluctuations in the sample rather than a true pattern in the data. This problem is even more significant when visualization is used to identify interesting patterns among many possible possibilities, or to identify an interesting deviation in a pair of observations among many possible pairs, as commonly done in visual recommendation systems. We present VizRec, a framework for improving the performance of visual recommendation systems by quantifying the statistical significance of recommended visualizations. The proposed methodology allows to control the probability of misleading visual recommendations using both classical statistical testing procedures and a novel application of the Vapnik Chervonenkis (VC) dimension method which is a fundamental concept in statistical learning theory. |
| VLocNet++ | Visual localization is one of the fundamental enablers of robot autonomy which has been mostly tackled using local feature-based pipelines that efficiently encode knowledge about the environment and the underlying geometrical constraints. Although deep learning based approaches have shown considerable robustness in the context of significant perceptual changes, repeating structures and textureless regions, their performance has been subpar in comparison to local feature-based pipelines. In this paper, we propose the novel VLocNet++ architecture that attempts to overcome this limitation by simultaneously embedding geometric and semantic knowledge of the world into the pose regression network. We adopt a multitask learning approach that exploits the inter-task relationship between learning semantics, regressing 6-DoF global pose and odometry, for the mutual benefit of each of these tasks. VLocNet++ incorporates the Geometric Consistency Loss function that utilizes the predicted motion from the odometry stream to enforce global consistency during pose regression. Furthermore, we propose a self-supervised warping technique that uses the relative motion to warp intermediate network representations in the segmentation stream for learning consistent semantics. In addition, we propose a novel adaptive weighted fusion layer to leverage inter and intra task dependencies based on region activations. Finally, we introduce a first-of-a-kind urban outdoor localization dataset with pixel-level semantic labels and multiple loops for training deep networks. Extensive experiments on the challenging indoor Microsoft 7-Scenes benchmark and our outdoor DeepLoc dataset demonstrate that our approach exceeds the state-of-the-art, outperforming local feature-based methods while exhibiting substantial robustness in challenging scenarios. |
| VLQ-ADC | Billion-scale high-dimensional approximate nearest neighbour (ANN) search has become an important problem for searching similar objects among the vast amount of images and videos available online. The existing ANN methods are usually characterized by their specific indexing structures, including the inverted index and the inverted multi-index. The inverted index structure is amenable to GPU-based implementations, and the state-of-the-art systems such as Faiss are able to exploit the massive parallelism offered by GPUs. However, the inverted index requires high memory overhead to index the dataset effectively. The inverted multi-index is difficult to implement for GPUs, and also ineffective in dealing with database with different data distributions. In this paper we propose a novel hierarchical inverted index structure generated by vector and line quantization methods. Our quantization method improves both search efficiency and accuracy, while maintaining comparable memory consumption. This is achieved by reducing search space and increasing the number of indexed regions. We introduce a new ANN search system, VLQ-ADC, that is based on the proposed inverted index, and perform extensive evaluation on two public billion-scale benchmark datasets SIFT1B and DEEP1B. Our evaluation shows that VLQ-ADC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art GPU- and CPU-based systems in terms of both accuracy and search speed. |
| V-Monotone Independence | We introduce and study a new notion of non-commutative independence, called V-monotone independence, which can be viewed as an extension of the monotone independence of Muraki. We investigate the combinatorics of mixed moments of V-monotone random variables and prove the central limit theorem. We obtain a combinatorial formula for the limit moments and we find the solution of the differential equation for the moment generating function in the implicit form. |
| Vocabulary-Informed Extreme Value Learning (ViEVL) |
The novel unseen classes can be formulated as the extreme values of known classes. This inspired the recent works on open-set recognition \cite{Scheirer_2013_TPAMI,Scheirer_2014_TPAMIb,EVM}, which however can have no way of naming the novel unseen classes. To solve this problem, we propose the Extreme Value Learning (EVL) formulation to learn the mapping from visual feature to semantic space. To model the margin and coverage distributions of each class, the Vocabulary-informed Learning (ViL) is adopted by using vast open vocabulary in the semantic space. Essentially, by incorporating the EVL and ViL, we for the first time propose a novel semantic embedding paradigm — Vocabulary-informed Extreme Value Learning (ViEVL), which embeds the visual features into semantic space in a probabilistic way. The learned embedding can be directly used to solve supervised learning, zero-shot and open set recognition simultaneously. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed frameworks. |
| Volatility | Volatility is the annualized standard deviation of returns – it is often expressed in percent. A volatility of 20 means that there is about a one-third probability that an asset’s price a year from now will have fallen or risen by more than 20% from its present value. |
| Volume-based Model | Active Learning (AL) is a learning task that requires learners interactively query the labels of the sampled unlabeled instances to minimize the training outputs with human supervisions. In theoretical study, learners approximate the version space which covers all possible classification hypothesis into a bounded convex body and try to shrink the volume of it into a half-space by a given cut size. However, only the hypersphere with finite VC dimensions has obtained formal approximation guarantees that hold when the classes of Euclidean space are separable with a margin. In this paper, we approximate the version space to a structured {hypersphere} that covers most of the hypotheses, and then divide the available AL sampling approaches into two kinds of strategies: Outer Volume Sampling and Inner Volume Sampling. After providing provable guarantees for the performance of AL in version space, we aggregate the two kinds of volumes to eliminate their sampling biases via finding the optimal inscribed hyperspheres in the enclosing space of outer volume. To touch the version space from Euclidean space, we propose a theoretical bridge called Volume-based Model that increases the `sampling target-independent’. In non-linear feature space, spanned by kernel, we use sequential optimization to globally optimize the original space to a sparse space by halving the size of the kernel space. Then, the EM (Expectation Maximization) model which returns the local center helps us to find a local representation. To describe this process, we propose an easy-to-implement algorithm called Volume-based AL (VAL). |
| Voronoi Cell Topology Visualization and Analysis Toolkit (VoroTop) |
This paper introduces a new open-source software program called VoroTop, which uses Voronoi topology to analyze local structure in atomic systems. Strengths of this approach include its abilities to analyze high-temperature systems and to characterize complex structure such as grain boundaries. This approach enables the automated analysis of systems and mechanisms previously not possible. |
| Voronoi Diagram | In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a way of dividing space into a number of regions. A set of points (called seeds, sites, or generators) is specified beforehand and for each seed there will be a corresponding region consisting of all points closer to that seed than to any other. The regions are called Voronoi cells. |
| Voronoi Diagram-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (VorEAl) |
This paper presents the Voronoi diagram-based evolutionary algorithm (VorEAl). VorEAl partitions input space in abnormal/normal subsets using Voronoi diagrams. Diagrams are evolved using a multi-objective bio-inspired approach in order to conjointly optimize classification metrics while also being able to represent areas of the data space that are not present in the training dataset. As part of the paper VorEAl is experimentally validated and contrasted with similar approaches. |
| VoteNet | Deep learning (DL) approaches are state-of-the-art for many medical image segmentation tasks. They offer a number of advantages: they can be trained for specific tasks, computations are fast at test time, and segmentation quality is typically high. In contrast, previously popular multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) methods are relatively slow (as they rely on costly registrations) and even though sophisticated label fusion strategies have been proposed, DL approaches generally outperform MAS. In this work, we propose a DL-based label fusion strategy (VoteNet) which locally selects a set of reliable atlases whose labels are then fused via plurality voting. Experiments on 3D brain MRI data show that by selecting a good initial atlas set MAS with VoteNet significantly outperforms a number of other label fusion strategies as well as a direct DL segmentation approach. We also provide an experimental analysis of the upper performance bound achievable by our method. While unlikely achievable in practice, this bound suggests room for further performance improvements. Lastly, to address the runtime disadvantage of standard MAS, all our results make use of a fast DL registration approach. |
| VoVNet | As DenseNet conserves intermediate features with diverse receptive fields by aggregating them with dense connection, it shows good performance on the object detection task. Although feature reuse enables DenseNet to produce strong features with a small number of model parameters and FLOPs, the detector with DenseNet backbone shows rather slow speed and low energy efficiency. We find the linearly increasing input channel by dense connection leads to heavy memory access cost, which causes computation overhead and more energy consumption. To solve the inefficiency of DenseNet, we propose an energy and computation efficient architecture called VoVNet comprised of One-Shot Aggregation (OSA). The OSA not only adopts the strength of DenseNet that represents diversified features with multi receptive fields but also overcomes the inefficiency of dense connection by aggregating all features only once in the last feature maps. To validate the effectiveness of VoVNet as a backbone network, we design both lightweight and large-scale VoVNet and apply them to one-stage and two-stage object detectors. Our VoVNet based detectors outperform DenseNet based ones with 2x faster speed and the energy consumptions are reduced by 1.6x – 4.1x. In addition to DenseNet, VoVNet also outperforms widely used ResNet backbone with faster speed and better energy efficiency. In particular, the small object detection performance has been significantly improved over DenseNet and ResNet. |
| Vowpal Wabbit | Vowpal Wabbit (aka VW) is an open source fast out-of-core learning system library and program developed originally at Yahoo! Research, and currently at Microsoft Research. It was started and is led by John Langford. Vowpal Wabbit’s is notable as an efficient scalable implementation of online machine learning and support for a number of machine learning reductions, importance weighting, and a selection of different loss functions and optimization algorithms. |
| VoxML | We present the specification for a modeling language, VoxML, which encodes semantic knowledge of real-world objects represented as three-dimensional models, and of events and attributes related to and enacted over these objects. VoxML is intended to overcome the limitations of existing 3D visual markup languages by allowing for the encoding of a broad range of semantic knowledge that can be exploited by a variety of systems and platforms, leading to multimodal simulations of real-world scenarios using conceptual objects that represent their semantic values. |
| VWPPR | Growing popularity of social networks demands a highly efficient Personalized PageRank (PPR) updating due to the fast-evolving web graphs of enormous size. While current researches are focusing on PPR updating under link structure modification, efficiently updating PPR when node insertion/ deletion involved remains a challenge. In the previous work called Virtual Web (VW), a few VW architectures are designed, which results in some highly effective initializations to significantly accelerate PageRank updating under both link modification and page insertion/deletion. In the paper, under the general scenario of link modification and node insertion/deletion we tackle the fast PPR updating problem. Specifically, we combine VW with the TrackingPPR method to generate initials, which are then used by the Gauss-Southwell method for fast PPR updating. The algorithm is named VWPPR method. In extensive experiments, three real-world datasets are used that contain 1~5.6M nodes and 6.7M~129M links, while a node perturbation of 40k and link perturbation of 1% are applied. Comparing to the more recent LazyForwardUpdate method, which handles the general PPR updating problem, the VWPPR method is 3~6 times faster in terms of running time, or 4.4~10 times faster in terms of iteration numbers. |